27 Jun 2016, 16:23

The good news : if you read French, you can follow me on CerenIT's blog. There is of course an RSS feed but mailchimp subscription has been removed.

It was and still is a good exercise as it allows to see trends over months, set dates & facts vs information streaming on twitter & co and of course helped me a lot to have a "technology radar" from which I could follow things over time. Explaining things is also a challenge, hope I did well on this and that you got some value from blog posts.

Except my family"s blog, seems it was my longest and more regular blogging experience so far: Almost 4 years and 110 blog posts !

Container

Containers are not VM : Docker precise the difference between a container and a VM with the analogy between Flat and House. A houste (VM) is full featured whereas the flat share some resources with its building.

Docker announced Docker pour Windows/Mac (beta) ; it provides a more native experience of Docker on Mac/Windows machine. On Windows, it requires Windows 10 at least to benefit from the Hyper-V hypervisor. On this topic, the Hypriot team, in their Docker for Mac review and Docker for Windows review introduces the easter egg of this version: it's now possible to run ARM containers on OSX/Windows environments ; It will allow to build containers for Raspberry or IoT projects in a faster and easier way. I can't test it now but seems far les complex to use than Docker Toolbox.

Rancher, another container orchestration solution, announced first their support of Kubernetes and then the release of the version 1.0. Project to follow, even if the concept of environment may not allow an optimialistic allocation of ressources (each environment would have its own hosts) whereas Kubernets may allow this with their global namespace approach.

Kubernetes, the container orchestration solution (for Docker/Rocket containers), built by Google, was just released as version 1.2 with lots of improvements and especially a new GUI (for the one not at ease with CLI).

Kubernetes on ARM also released their 0.7 version ; an easy way to learn kubernetes on your Raspberry box. ; A rancher image is also available.

Docker en production : la bataille sanglante des orchestrateurs de conteneurs : To conclude, OCTO compared Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Openshift and states Kubernetes as the current winner. From my point of view, as we can use Docker container with both solutions, it may be more intersting to use both : Docker swarm in a dev/lab oriented manner and Kubernetes more for operations. Kubernetes was initially built for ops and tries to be also developper friendy, with Docker doing the opposite.

Elasticsearch & friends

Reindex is coming : With Elasticsearch 2.3, you can reindex documents in a new index or enrich documents in an existing one.

Elastic decided to make their release more coherence and uniform and so took the number 5 as default value for every product. Please enter 5.0-alpha1 with the release of the Elastic Stack ; beyond naming convention, it's a commitment to provide a coherent platform for the Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash and Beats products. Marvel, Shield and Watcher have been combined into the X-Pack. I let you read new features and improvements of elasticsearch 5.0.0-alpha1 or the new look of Kibana.

Sysadmin

Teleport ; A SSH gateway which allows to access to servers via SSH or HTTPS with a Web GUI.

Security

VNCFail ; vous reprendrez bien un peu de non sécurité: The analysis of 4 billion IPV4 addresses from which 5 millions hosts have VPN (remote control software) opened and at the end 2.246 hosts for which you can access systems without any password. Systems as air condionnting, electricity factory, etc.

Kafka

Confluent released a custom version of what will be in Kafka 0.10 and it's called Kafka Streams ; it aims to manipulate data within Kafka without requiring any external system such as Spark & co. Interesting move to make it feature richer and more autonomous to enirch data but challenge may be that kafka was performant due to it's low level of features. Will it remain performant with such additions ?

Docker

"Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox" according to the site

First, I was sceptical as it requires the whole ecosystem to move from ubuntu to alpine ; indeed, wether you like it or not, people are used to ubuntu/debian and other mainstream distribution and all packages we are used to have are not yet available in alpinelinux also. To be honest, main packages are available.

Then, a debian or whatever base image will still exist, be safe with that ; however, if you want to "hack" / inherit from a docker base image, you'll have to switch to Alpine.

Third, we could consider that once your docker host has the base image in cache, the ~180M size of base image is not an issue. But starting from 5M may be a good argument however.

Starting testing it on ARM device and especially Raspberry Pi, I'm quite pleased with its reactivity and packages available.

10 Feb 2016, 09:30

Elasticsearch

What's new in Elasticsearch 3.0 ; "Elasticsearch 2 [released in Oct 2015] was about stability and availability. Elasticsearch 3 is clearly about features" ; it's maybe too early to say if all the features will land in 3.0 or in 3.x and especially as it seems there no public roadmap (yet ?). However it's interesting to see where they tend to go.

Spark

Spark 2015 year in review : Databricks (core developper of Spark) made a review of 2015 : the 4 release, the features, how spark is used, etc. I was surprised to see that majority of spark usage was as a standadlone cluster and not in an Hadoop context.

27 Jan 2016, 09:30

Website Obesity

Website obesity crisis : transcript of a talk (video can be seen too from the link) about webperformance, bloated websites and how fat sites become for almost no real value for end users. Long but funny and instructive. It makes you think on how complex, fat and bloated the web is nowadays, in terms of tooling, architecture, code and content.

AngularJS

Postgres

The most advanced opensource database of the world, ie Postgres for short, was released as 9.5 version (FR / EN) ; it brings the long expected "UPSERT" features, Row level security and some big-data features (improved index, faster sorts, connection to Hadoop/Cassandra via FDW, etc)

In French a deeper view of the 9.5 release (part 1, part 2, part 3) to better understand what contains this release.

AngularJS 2.0 beta has been released and what it means for you. I knew about ngUpgrade but not about ngForward. Both seems to do the same thing (ie let you write Angular 1 apps with Angular 2 syntax) but maybe the latter is more optimised in terms of ressources ?

AMP

Google released AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) which is a subset of HTML to have the minimal formatting for content but possibly with ads and analytics embeded. It aims to speed up the web as Google defined it :

Instant. Everywhere.

For many, reading on the mobile web is a slow, clunky and frustrating experience - but it doesn’t have to be that way. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere.

Online advertising - current situation (in French) : A summary to have the whole context on online advertising, the decrease of ads revenues, the rise of ad blockers and the possible alternatives, such as AMP but not only.

Spark for Data Padawans (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) ; even if latest blog post is commercial oriented, the first three parts have the merits to introduce Hadoo, Map Reduce and Spark : what they are and how they interact with eact other (or not).

Cloudera releasedKudu, a new storage system which tries to face HDFS limitations and HBase ones ; as they state :

HDFS is the filesystem of choice in Hadoop, with the speed and economics ideal for building an active archive.

For online data serving applications, such as ad bidding platforms, HBase will continue to be ideal with its fast ability to handle updating data.

Kudu will handle the use cases that require a simultaneous combination of sequential and random reads and writes – such as for real-time fraud detection, online reporting of market data, or location-based targeting of loyalty offers.

Confluent, the core contributor of Kafka releases their distribution Confluent Platform 2.0, with all features above and the schema registry which allow versionning at least of your message schemas (and compatibility for what I understood). This platform is open-source too with paid support if needed.